NATO in the 80s of 20th century was organized into Corps Sectors for political reasons, which exposed vulnerabilities to Soviet notions of “Coalitional Warfare” (Vugraph from SHAPEX-82 Briefing by Hines and Petersen)
In what may well become the penultimate assessment of the genuine military challenge posed by this particular terrain feature to the contemporary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Carsten Schmiedl has edited an impressive operational-tactical assessment of what is more properly called the “Suwałki Corridor” in a July 2018 study by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Appropriately, the CEPA Study begins by framing what it calls “The Issue”:
A 65-kilometer [approximately 40 miles] wide stretch of land between Belarus and Kaliningrad — the Suwałki Corridor — is some of the most important territory within NATO’s borders. It is NATO’s physical link between the Baltic littoral to the north and the European plain to the south. If this Corridor is not fully secured, NATO’s credibility as a security guarantor to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia could be seriously undermined. An enduring solution requires fresh ideas in strategy, statecraft, deterrence, and defense.
Having appropriately defined the issue, the study subsequently gets sidetracked by an incorrect assumption – but the conventional wisdom of many during the Cold War – that history and terrain would dictate the so-called “Fulda Gap” as the decisive place for defeated a Soviet invasion of the Federal Republic of Germany. As described by Wikipedia, the Fulda Gap (German: Fulda-Lücke) is an area between the Hesse-Thuringian border (the former Inner German border) and Frankfurt am Main that contains two corridors of lowlands through which tanks might have driven in a surprise attack effort by the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies to gain crossing(s) of the Rhine River. Named for the town of Fulda, the Fulda Gap was strategically important during the Cold War.
According to Wikipedia, “strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain understood the Fulda Gap’s importance, and accordingly allocated forces to defend and attack it. The defense of the Fulda Gap was a mission of the U.S. V Corps. Wikipedia continues with its description of the Fulda Gap by explaining that “in order to defend the Fulda Gap and stop a Warsaw Pact advance (as opposed to conducting screening and delaying actions), U.S. V Corps planned to move two divisions (one armored and one mechanized) forward from bases in the Frankfurt and Bad Kreuznach [southwest of Frankfurt] areas.
The topography around the Fulda Gap illustrates why the Fulda River Valley was perceived by the American forces as a key terrain feature in the effort to defend the Federal Republic of Germany against a Warsaw Pact attack. If a Soviet attack could have reached Fulda, Tactical Axes could have traversed to the north and the south of the massif known as the Vogelsberg Mountains. The Fulda Gap was almost perceived as a “highway” from the Inner-German border into the heart of NATO defenses.
The CEPA Study correctly observes that “more important than the overall balance of forces at the Fulda Gap is its legacy for first defining and then reshaping western military thinking. The stand-off at Fulda provided a focal point for the tactical and operational modernization of NATO forces near the end of the Cold War.” However, the CEPA Study incorrectly attributes “careful study and conceptual, technological, and structural innovations that propelled a speedier end to the Cold War” to “the need to better defend the Fulda Gap.” In fact, the Fulda Gap had little to do with the NATO transformation under what became known as the “Follow-on Forces Attack” plans adopted by NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, General Bernard Rogers. “It was at the close of 1981, just three months after Zapad-81, General Bernard Rogers…received a personal and topsecret briefing at his headquarters at Mons in Belgium. His briefers were the two DIA analysts who were most knowledgeable about Ogarkov’s plans. When they had finished, Rogers reportedly told them, ‘For the first time in my career, I really feel that I am getting inside the mind of my adversary.’” This critical event had both a preface and as well as an epilogue.
The Inner-German border (German: innerdeutsche Grenze or deutsch-deutsche Grenze; initially also Zonengrenze) was the border between the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany) from 1949 to 1990. Not including the similar and physically separate Berlin Wall, the border was 1,393 kilometres (866 mi) long and ran from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia
Both photographs were taken by the author in July 1984, when Philip Karber invited him to join a terrain tour of the entire inner German border organized for and led by German general Franz-Joseph Schulze (who had also been Commander-in- Chief, Allied Forces Central Europe). Note that the soil was plowed so that any human activity across the border could be detected.
THE PREFACE
The research that preceded the Roger’s briefing at SHAPE Headquarters had its beginnings with two independent initiatives: one of those involved research on how the Soviet General Staff intended to prevent NATO from employing its fixed-wing air assets to intervene in a land battle with the Warsaw Pact; the other, an effort to understand curious observations of Soviet and Warsaw Pact writings and exercises about “mobile groups” and “operational maneuver groups.”
A civilian and an Air Force officer working as Warsaw Pact analysts for the Defense Intelligence Agency, located in the old “B Building” World War 2 barracks at Arlington Hall Station developed a briefing explaining how an Air Operation (Vozdushnaya operatsiya) would be employed to open penetration corridors through NATO’s Hawk Belt air defenses to attack NATO’s Main Operating Bases in an effort to prevent NATO from employing its superior fixed-wing aviation assets in support of NATO’s ground forces in the event of armed conflict. The other research has a more complicated history.
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was put together, much like the Department of Homeland Security, with the reallocation of personnel “slots” from other U.S. Government agencies. In the case of DIA, the slots came from Service intelligence agencies, in the mode closer to a “reorganization” than to an “expansion.” While this approach allows the politicians to claim to be doing something new, it’s far from the ideal solution, since when government organizations lose personnel “slots” they try to send along with them the people they least wish to retain. While this obviously has a near- to medium-term impact upon the civilians in the new agency, the rotating military slots tend to quickly assume no less than the previous organization’s competence. Thus it was no surprise that the rare communications officer to graduate from the U.S. Army’s Soviet Foreign Area Officer program at Garmisch in Bavaria ended up at DIA. Major John G. Hines, who simply loved to practice his Russian language, spent a lot of time over at what was called “the cafeteria” next to Buildings A and B at Arlington Hall Station. The “cafeteria” was where those awaiting their security clearances were sent to work, alongside many of the uniformed “defectors” that the U.S. collected over the course of the Cold War. These defectors had no commercial skills to survive in the market place and needed to be “taken care of” so as to avoid discouraging subsequent defectors from the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. In fact, it was almost an “education in itself” to spend time at the “cafeteria” because one could observe all the internal tensions within the Warsaw Pact among the officers who came each work day so as to continue to draw a “living-wage” from the United States Government. The “national” jealousies amongst the defectors was only amplified by the attention they either received or failed to receive from the cleared analysts working in Buildings A and B.
Hines befriended one particular defector – known as Richard Oden – who was a former Polish fighter pilot, but whom consumed every Polish-language military journal that DIA would provide him with. As it turned out, Oden was tracking something that the Poles (as well as the Czecho-Slovaks) were referring to as “operational maneuver groups” or “OMGs”. All the other Warsaw Pact military journals were only referring to “mobile groups” in their open-source military literature. At about the same time that Hines was playing catch-up with the assistance of Oden regarding the use of OMGs to increase the “tempo of advance” in conducting offensive operations (the choice of this word “operational” as opposed to “action” was of great significance in indicating the “scale” of the combat activity at which the OMG was to play), two other analysts were struggling with arriving at an understanding of a new “dynamism” in the Warsaw Pact ground forces. In the United States, Philip A. Karber was interpreting increased attention to “tactical raiding detachments” as a “tactical revolution” and attempted to promote his observations with references to “daring thrusts.” Some of the analysts at DIA were upset with what they interpreted as the “sensationalizing” of elements widely misunderstood (including by themselves) as simply an issue related to the emergence of man-portable anti-tank weapons, and “tasked” the civilian analyst that subsequently led the DIA Air Operation work to evaluate it.
During one training exercise, the results of strikes delivered on dummy airfields on ten test ranges where 313 aircraft models were emplaced, 45% of the aircraft, 100% of the runways, and 51% of the command posts were destroyed. In addition 43% of radar posts, 45% of SAM control points, and 43% anti-aircraft artillery batteries were knocked out.” (Vugraph from SHAPEX-82 Briefing by Hines and Petersen)
The second analyst struggling with the intensifying discussions in Warsaw Pact military journals about the contemporary relevance of mobile groups was Christopher Donnelly of the United Kingdom. Materials gathered by Oden were informally transferred to Donnelly in a “non-descript brown envelope” after a lecture by him in the auditorium of DIA’s “B Building”, and assisted him in, at long last, opening an informed discussion about improving Soviet chances for rapid conventional success against a nuclear-armed enemy. For all the advantages of the DIA analysts in possessing exceptionally unique documentary evidence for explaining the rather dramatic developments unfolding in the Group of Soviet Forces Germany (GSFG) and the Warsaw Pact as a whole, it was the incalculable contribution of Richard Oden that allowed Western analysts to break the embargo by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union and Europe, Dr. Winfred Joshua, on the Kremlin’s plans to win a conventional war against NATO. Still, nobody had “put the parts together,” and it was the Chief of the Warsaw Pact Ground Forces Branch of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact Division in DIA’s Directorate for Research – Colonel Peter Shields Meckel – who, after hearing both briefings and understanding very well the “combined-arms” approach of the Soviets to warfare, sent then Major John Hines to the C3 and Force Analysis Branch to talk to the Air Operation analyst. After listening to Hines lay out his thesis concerning what was happening in the ground domain, the air domain analyst understood yet another fundamental difference between the Soviets and the Americans: the Soviets thought not about the land war, the air war, and the naval war; rather the Soviets were planning for “THE war” as if it were a single integrated whole. Soon thereafter, the Air Operation analysts (Petersen and Clark) took an expanded briefing to Europe. Before any such briefing could be presented to the Allies, however, it had to first be briefed to and approved by the Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command, who was then Air Force General William Y. Smith. Petersen took Major Clark with him to brief General Smith in his Stuttgart, Germany Headquarters, and the general pronounced that he was not going to allow such a briefing to be presented to NATO commands for fear of “scaring them.” Petersen, in response, asked Smith to give him the opportunity to persuade him on the basis of the evidence behind the briefing. Several weeks later, Petersen received word from the Pentagon that General Smith requested that he be briefed in “the tank” (an especially secure briefing facility in the Pentagon). This time, Petersen asked Major Hines to accompany him.
The two DIA analysts simply laid out a series of vugraphs with quotes from highly sensitive Soviet and Warsaw Pact documents, and let General Smith read them. Smith took his time, reading every slide very carefully, and occasionally asked a question or two so as to insure that he understood fully the context of each quote. When he had completed reading all the materials the two analysts had brought from Arlington Hall to the Pentagon, Smith asked “has Bernie Rogers seen this material.” Petersen explained that the materials could not leave American territory, so it was possible that the NATO Supreme Commander was unaware of the supreme confidence with which it was possible to predict Soviet intentions. Not long afterwards, Hines and Petersen were informed that their briefing would be transported on the SACEUR’s personal plane to Mons where it would await their arrival to brief General Rogers.
Hines and Petersen arrived in Mons, were provided their briefing vugraphs, and briefed by Roger’s Chief of Staff – Colonel England – that the SACEUR had twenty-six “stars” awaiting him to discuss how best to employ emerging technologies to deal with the Russian “tank threat” so Hines and Petersen had only twenty minutes to brief him. To make the most effective use of the limited time, Petersen suggested that they simply “flip” through the vugraphs, and that Hines and Petersen only take questions from the SACEUR. With Colonel England giving Petersen “dirty looks” as he changed slides, Rogers asked Petersen to not change the vugraphs until he’d indicated that he was finished with it. After telling Petersen a second time that he was not to remove a vugraph until he said so, Rogers assured him that, whatever the Colonel had told him, the SACEUR was intrigued by what he was seeing and would take all the time that he needed to understand the significance of intelligence that was clearly new to him.
Once General Rogers had gone through the materials and asked several questions about the sources themselves, he asked if the briefers could present the same briefing to NATO. After explaining the sensitivity of the materials and noting that the materials belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency and not to DIA, the SACEUR stated that he would issue a request to the DIA Director that the two analysts prepare a Top Secret Sensitive version of the briefing that could be presented as the SACEUR’s Briefing during the April 1982 SHAPEX Conference. Subsequently, Hines and Petersen were informed that they would not only “build” the briefing, but present it themselves on the SACEUR’s behalf. The afternoon of the same day they briefed the SHAPEX-82 Conference, they presented their briefing to the NATO Military Committee in Brussels and, subsequently, to every major NATO-subordinated command.
William Young Smith (August 13, 1925 – January 19, 2016) was a United States Air Force four-star general who served as Chief of Staff, and as Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (COFS SHAPE) from 1979 to 1981 and as Deputy Commander in Chief, U.S. European Command (DCINCEUR) from 1981 until his retirement from military service in 1983.
Right: Bernard William Rogers (July 16, 1921 – October 27, 2008) was a United States Army four-star general who served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1976 until 1979, and as Supreme Allied Commander Europe
(SACEUR) from 1979 until 1987. General Rogers retired as a result of his clash with President Ronald Reagan over the INF Treaty.
The major understanding about Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov’s thinking that the SACEUR obtained from the sensitive materials briefed him by Hines and Petersen, and the understanding that Rogers wanted the major NATO-subordinated commands to grasp, was that Ogarkov planned to prevent NATO fixed-wing aviation from contributing to the initial ground battle, fight Army-level battles of penetration of NATO’s forward tactical zone (50 kilometers in depth) in selected locations, send Army-subordinated and Front-subordinated operational maneuver groups deep into NATO defenses to seize river lines that could be employed to prevent the withdrawal of NATO forces to establish subsequent defensive lines that would require subsequent Army-level battles of penetration. Soviet Intelligence had a good understanding of NATO organization, and since the Soviet General Staff believed that fifty-percent of casualties at the Army-level occurred during the penetration phase of the battle, Ogarkov intended to encircle NATO Corps (and even Army Groups) so as to destroy them without having to fight a second battle of penetration at the Army-level.
The Soviet OMG was, in effect, a “deep, one-way raid.” Rather than the OGM returning to its own lines, its own forces were to “catch up with it” and, by doing so, encircle NATO forces so as to make nuclear targeting difficult and where NATO forces could be held at risk. (Vugraph from SHAPEX-82 Briefing by Hines and Petersen)
Vugraph from SHAPEX-82 Briefing by Hines and Petersen.
When NATO’s deployment was combined with the terrain, the main axes of advance emerged organically. (Vugraph from SHAPEX-82 Briefing by Hines and Petersen.)
As explained by the CEPA Study, during the Cold War, NATO’s organizing concept for Europe was premised on the principle of defense-in-depth. At potential flashpoints like Fulda, allied forces enjoyed the geographic depth necessary to trade space for time. The luxury of space in Western Europe therefore allowed NATO armies the option of making a temporary retreat in response to a Soviet attack. If such a retreat ever occurred, it would have been followed by a regrouping and concentration of allied forces—and the launch of a NATO counteroffensive to retake lost ground. In this way, NATO was prepared to cede territory to an attacker in exchange for the time needed to muster a counterattack. Such an approach was ideally tailored to the circumstances of the Cold War.
And this was precisely what Ogarkov planned to prevent.
So as to avoid any accusation of oversimplification, however, it should also be noted, that it was not just General Roger’s commitment to FOFA that ultimately undid all of Ogarkov’s operational planning. First of all, as observed by Barrass, there was Colonel Ghulam Dastagir Wardak’s lesson to the 1st British Corps that led its commander to take steps necessary to confront the possibility of encirclement when he took command of NATO’s Northern Army Group (see Figure 13). Second, there was the shift of the REFORGER 87 Exercise to deploy the US III Corps to northern Germany as reinforcement to the Northern Army Group. Third, the Swedish Army and Air Forces acquired NATO combatable equipment that allowed for the possibility of the Swedish Army to threaten both the Soviet Air Operation and its Southern Arm of Encirclement in the Western Theater of Strategic Military Action. Fourth, thanks to the “popularization” of European military geography by yet another of “the friends of [Christopher] Donnelly” – Christopher Duffy – it increasingly became impossible for the defense debate in the West to ignore “the deeper geographical and historical perspectives.” Duffy contributed substantially to a reduction of “the enourmous gulf which yawns between academic strategic studies on the one side, and the detail of weapons and military operations, which is the realm of the scientists and the serving officers.” Finally, it should also not go unmentioned that Ogarkov’s obsession with the requirements for his plans led to the collapse of the Soviet economy.
Russia’s Contemporary Strategic “War Termination” Operation Option
The challenge, however, is an operational-tactical problem. Being only 65-kilometers wide, the Corridor can be closed by fires from both Kaliningrad and Belarus. Thus, occupation of the Corridor itself does not guarantee its use, and most certainly cannot be secured without the freedom to conduct counterbattery fires at will against Russian (as well as Belarus, although this might be easier since Belarus is not a nuclear power) territory. While the requirement to keep the nearly 1,000 kilometer line of communication (LOC) between Warsaw and Tallinn open is of geostrategic criticality, it is a task that requires a geo-political decision that operational-tactical level commanders need policy-makers to address today and not during a crisis when everybody will have an opinion and commanders on the ground will have no time to seek the approval of authorities with conflicted interests.
The focus on defense of the Suwałki Corridor obfuscates, as did the focus on the Fulda Gap during the Cold War, the real operational-strategic challenge. Over focusing on operational-tactical success (holding the Fulda Gap during the Cold War, or keeping the Suwałki Corridor open to the deployment of NATO forces into the Baltic States) risks the concentration of ground forces in the northeast corner of Poland, where they might well be encircled and either held hostage in a demand for war termination or destroyed so as to not be available for subsequent operations. Given that every major offensive in Russia’s war against Ukraine in the Donbas has been an encirclement resulting in dramatic losses of equipment (to include American-provided counter-battery radars), even when the Russians didn’t have sufficient numbers of forces to completely prevent the exfiltration of Ukrainian troops, would suggest that NATO forces committed to holding open the Corridor would be prime candidates for such an encirclement operation.
The Russian General Staff would have little reason not to “dust off” both the successful plan of 1831 to crush the Polish uprising against the Tsarist Empire as well as the unsuccessful Tukhachevsky plan of 1920 to conquer Poland on the way to spreading Bolshevism to Germany, since East Prussia, having become Kaliningrad Oblast translates into diminished operational risk and more opportunities than in 1920.
S&F Hero: Military Art: The Suwałki Corridor as a Subject of Self-Obfuscation (Podcast)
Autor
Dr. Phillip A. Petersen
President of the New Generation Warfare Centre (NGWC). From October 1991 through the December 2017 at The Potomac Foundation. In this capacity, he co-authored the Baltic Security Net Assessment for the Baltic Defense College in Tartu, Estonia. The Baltic Security Net Assessment marked a culmination of Dr. Petersen’s unique educational and career experience along with a determination to provide operational-strategic war-fighters with an operational-tactical guide on necessary demands to make from military intelligence resources. Having worked with Andrew Marshall during his time at the Defense Intelligence Agency and in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and having been taught the importance of terrain by German General and former Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe Franz-Joseph Schulze, Dr. Petersen was able to fuse terrain analysis of the Baltic States with the revolutionary wargaming work of Mr. Edmund Bitinas. The result produced a Baltic Security Net Assessment that focused on questions relevant to practical problem solving within NATO’s contemporary military infrastructure.
Having predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, he came to Potomac in anticipation of conducting a three-year interview project on Security Policy in the Post-Soviet Republics. Visiting all fifteen of the former Soviet republics, fifteen of the regions of the Russian Federation, and interviewing over 400 senior officials, Dr. Petersen’s research was published in the Journal of European Security. Subsequently, as part of Potomac’s NATO Enlargement Initiative, Dr. Petersen conducted multiple tours for U.S. Congressional Staff Delegations to Eastern Europe to promote an increase in NATO membership.
Dr. Petersen’s received his Masters at Western Michigan University with his thesis on Systemic Adaptation: Can The Soviet System Accommodate The "Democratic Movement"? He later received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois with his dissertation on Images As Defense Policy Determinants In The Soviet-American Military Relationship Since 1945. Dr. Petersen served for fifteen years as a United States Army officer, as an intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and as a policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and at the National Defense University. He has authored some eighty publications on international security issues, believing that it is the responsibility of each generation to insure that the next generation is sufficiently educated on the errors of the past to make its own, original mistakes.
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